Having recently come from a Sony Vegas NLE environment, I'm lovin' Premier Pro (ver 4.1) but I greatly miss one Vegas feature that I have not been able to find in Premier.

That is, to sweep out a portion of the timeline to determine its length. For example, to find out the length of music fill needed between two marker points.

So far the only way I have be able to determine such durations is to position the cursor and the end and the beginning points and subtract the Timeliine Counter values, but that is a bit of a cumbersome and messy way to have to do it.

I have tried every Shift/Control/Alt key combination with cursor click and drag operastions, but nothing does what I want.

Is it possible to somehow measure the time span between two points on the timeline?

The easiest way is to display the entire Duration of the Timeline with the \ [Backslash] key, and then grab the Head and Tail to get them close to where you want it. Zoom in, and adjust. Unless CS4 has added a "set WAB Head/Tail to CTI" I'm at a loss as to what would be easier.

Good luck,

Hunt

BTW - that \ is good to do a final check for "orphans," etc., especially if it seems that your Timeline is longer, than you think it should be.

It's taken me several hundred hours of intensive work to come up to speed on Premier and the full CS4 suite after years of Vegas use, but I'm loving everything and highly impressed by my newfound capabilities.

I'm headed for Thailand in several months and can't wait to produce a Blu-Ray travelogue of the experience. It will be my first serious test of Premier, although I have two smaller projects before, just to get fully up to speed.

Sony Vegas and FCP are a couple of NLE's that I have not used. I cannot offer any "leg up" from Sony to PrPro. However, if you have not seen this SITE, there is a lot of great material there, especially the options, features and changes in CS4.

I also highly recommend the Adobe Classroom in a Book Premiere CS4. Unlike some earlier versions of this series, this one concentrates on a lot more of the "why," and not just the "how."

Travel safely and edit well,

Good luck, and don't hesitate to drop back in with any questions. There will almost nothing that someone here cannot help you with.

First, in response to Ken's inquiry about making the WAB appear if it's not visible at your current view of the sequence: yes, this can be done easily. Simply double-click on the sequence time ruler, and the WAB will automatically be set to the duration of your current sequence, dictated by the level of zoom into or out of the sequence. In other words, if you're zoomed in far enough to only see 5 seconds of a 10 minute timeline, the WAB will be set to those 5 seconds. At full zoom out--you'll sometimes see it referred to 80/20 (referring to percent) zoom--this same manuever will set the WAB to the full duration of the sequence.

And to Hunt's posit:

Unless CS4 has added a "set WAB Head/Tail to CTI" I'm at a loss as to what would be easier.

Oh, indeed, there is something easier! The default CS4 shortcut for setting the WAB in point is Alt+[, and setting the out is Alt+]. I remapped these to Shift+I and Shift+O, respectively, which made more sense to me, but the fact remains that the ability is there. I think this was in CS3, too... though I can't recall for sure.

there is something easier! The default CS4 shortcut for setting the WAB in point is Alt+[, and setting the out is Alt+]

Neat. I assumed that there must be an easier way, though mine would work - only with a bit of dragging. I assume that this is TO the CTI. Am I correct on that? [Guess who has not upgraded to CS4 yet...]

The reason that I like the WAB method vs the Lasso method, is that one can set the WAB to a frame level and not just the In and Out Points of Clips. Often, I am looking to score music to positions within the the In & Out Points. The Lasso relies on those In & Out Points, which might work well, or maybe not.

That is correct. It functions in much the same way that you add a regular in or out point.

[Guess who has not upgraded to CS4 yet...]

Um... yeah. When you gonna get on that? We've gotta start having these convos on the level!

The reason that I like the WAB method vs the Lasso method, is that one can set the WAB to a frame level and not just the In and Out Points of Clips. Often, I am looking to score music to positions within the the In & Out Points. The Lasso relies on those In & Out Points, which might work well, or maybe not.

Very true, and good point. You can also use the second method I posted by adapting it to a more "manual" approach; simply use any of the usual methods of adding setting standard in/out points in the sequence, and the I/O duration will be reflected in the Program Monitor display. This way, the duration is tied to your "start" and "stop" points, and not by clip boundaries.

Hunt - from experience I can say that you are "Right on" with the wiki and book recommendations. They are both the first thing I did when I got The CS4 series.

I watched a lot of the training videos (Lyndia?) first to get an overview of things, then started going thru all the courses. After each course session I would then do a mini project on my own to make sure I had really grasped the training material.

After 2 months of almost daily course work, I finally started a complete project last week to create a Ken Burns (Civil Wars series on PBS) type image animation of our last motorcycle trip thru the West Virginia mountains a month ago. Only have about 40 pictures and 2 minutes of (camera) video but animating it all and laying down music and narration tracks give me a pretty complete project scope that helps me to see what I know and what I don't so I can go back and brush up where needed.

When I first got into video (though I had extensive experience in cine), I did pretty much the same. The manual (they were actually printed on paper back then) was the first thing that I went through, even prior to installation. A lot of it made sense, but NLE work was different, than what I had done with film. The terms had changed in many instances, and there were so many new ones, that were alien to me. Installed and poked around. Back to the manual with the program open. Hey, now some things were perfectly clear.

I did a few simple Projects and struggled though them, with the manual close at hand. After a half-dozen of these, I reread the manual from front to back again. A lot more was sinking in. That program did not have a CiaB, and Lynda.com did not have any lessons on it at the time. Back to the personal Projects, and I kept adding things, until I finally felt comfortable. That program did have a pretty good forum, though like this one, most of the posts were on installation and launch issues. Still, there were some good posts on actually doing something in the program.

Out of the blue, a still, advertising client approached me with a video Project. Luckily, it was simple and not unlike your starter Project. I took a big breath and accepted the assignment. Luckily, the timeframe was very lenient and the client was willing to view a lot of "rushes." Wow, I was having fun. It was like the old days in the edit suite, but on my laptop. Things were so easy, compared to the "good old days." The rest, as they say, is history.

With PrPro, I did have the CiaB series, and they still did manuals back then. Pretty much the same drill - read, read, do, read. For each version of PrPro, that I have had, I always get CiaB, and will buy the manuals (now) from Adobe. Also, this forum has been wonderful. When I moved up to Encore, I sat down and read every post in the old forum, except for the Mac Error Messages sub-forum. Instantly bought Jeff Bellune's Encore book, and read, read, did, read, did...

Now, that is how I learn best: reading then doing. I am less of a tutorial person. My wife, who is far better a student, than I am, learns best by watching, then doing. Reading is #3 on her list. Still, she's the one with the all of those advanced degrees! Oh, she does her reading, but gets much more by seeing and experiencing, than I do. Just different learning styles. My experiences with her are the reason that I do not come down on people, who never crack a manual, regardless of how effective they are for me. Some learn better by doing, then watching, then reading. It's just their style.

I do not denegrate tutorials, as my wife would benefit far more from a few of those, than a stack of well-written books - different styles for different folk.

Good feedback Hunt. Thanks, and thanks to everyone in the Forum here that has been so very helpful, so quickly.

I copied/pasted/edited all the suggestions into a nice "How Do" document to add to my growing collection. Since I am an "amateur" I find that I will sometimes go for months without a project and them back and forget how to do things. Documenting those items I know I will be using has really helped.